Cornerstone 02 - Keystone

by Misty Provencher

  Her gaze rolls over Sean and lingers on Garrett and I.

  “Ok, we’d better all go and get settled.”

  “I’ll show them to their rooms,” Freddie says and we follow him away from the gym doors. I wonder where they’re going even more than where Freddie’s taking us because I can’t imagine Mrs. Reese and Iris, Nok and the Addo, all curled up on weight benches and treadmills, trying to sleep.

  Freddie leads us from the narrow hall to a labyrinth of wider ones. We pass a service elevator and go down another hallway that is identical to all the others, with mocha-colored squares on the carpet and latte walls.

  “Alright,” Freddie says as he lurches to a halt in front of one of the unnumbered doors. He punches a code into a keypad and swings it open. “Mark and Brandon, you’re this one. The lock combo numbers on the dresser. Memorize them or you’ll be sleeping in the hall, because I’m only letting you in this once.”

  “Because the lock code is so unique?” Sean asks, craning toward Freddie.

  “No.” Freddie grunts. “It’s because I’m not going to be unlocking the doors every ten seconds just because nobody bothered to memorize the code.”

  “Oh.” Sean straightens back and he clamps his lips shut. Mark and Brandon disappear inside and immediately shout back, “It’s a whole apartment! Holy crap!”

  Freddie just closes the door behind them and moves to the next door.

  “I’ll probably regret that,” he says. “Sean and Garrett, this is you.”

  He opens the door and steps aside for Sean and Garrett before catching a glimpse of my toes poking out beneath the ragged hem of my dress. He looks back up and seems to notice Garrett’s dress shirt hanging off me for the first time. “I’ll put in another call to FIXI. We’ve got your kitchen stocked, but they’ve been running behind with all the relocations. They’ll deliver your clothes in a few hours, at the most.”

  “Um…okay…” I say. He says things so casually that I feel stupid asking what he’s talking about. Garrett adds, “Could you ask them to leave out anything orange or fleece from Nali’s delivery?”

  “Sure,” Freddie says with an amused chuckle. He moves to the next door. “Lucky you, Nalena. You’ve got this one all to yourself.”

  I don’t feel lucky at all, but after Freddie pops the door open, he runs a hand over his face like he’s exhausted, so all I say is thank you and step inside, letting him close the door behind me.

  The room isn’t anything I expect. Instead, it’s exactly what Sean and Mark and Brandon said it is: a whole apartment. When I walk in the door, there is a short hall with a table to dump keys on and coat hooks. Beyond that is an archway into a kitchen that seems bigger than the paper-filled one my mom and I had in our old apartment. Across from the kitchen is another archway, leading to a bedroom, but straight ahead, beyond the archways, is a living room. It’s capped at the end with a dark, sliding glass door, the opened vertical blinds bunched at one end.

  Walking into my first place for the first time wasn’t supposed to be like this. My mom should be here making her cheesecake noises and gushing about how awesome it is that I’ve grown up and got my own place. I should have heavy boxes full of belongings, so I can complain about having to move it all in. I should be excited.

  I shouldn’t be reading a note on the kitchen counter about key combinations and security systems and impenetrable glass.

  I hear a soft knock on the patio door. It’s too soft of a knock to be dangerous, I think, but my field is up as I cross the living room. It’s gone the second I can make out Garrett, standing on the moonlit patio blocks outside. I open the door.

  “Incredible, huh?” he says as I step outside, but all I can do is stare.

  The courtyard is beyond incredible. It is a huge, round atrium with a small waterfall and full-grown trees. There’s got to be more than a dozen other sliding glass doors lining the atrium on this floor, but they’re all dark beside the Reese boys’ and mine.

  I lean way back to look up and find the roof. It’s a glass dome, maybe ten or eleven floors above my head. There are patio ledges and hanging plants and enough doors to make this courtyard a whole colony. It’s a little overwhelming.

  “What do you think of your place?” Garrett asks.

  I just laugh the words back: my place. I can’t tell him that the hotel apartment is swallowing me whole. That it feels like I’m in a different universe, stumbling around beside him, imitating myself. My guts are twisted up like a crazy straw and I’m never going to let anyone know it. I’m Contego now.

  He sways one shoulder, like he’s going to bump mine with it, but it doesn’t make contact. I still feel the energy pulse in the gap between us. It jumps from him to me and dissolves into my skin, running through my veins. I smile at him.

  “It’s great,” I say.

  “I’ll be right next door the whole time, you know,” he says. “No worries.”

  “I’m not worried.” I sound like I mean it, which is a good surprise. “You can’t always be worrying about me either, Garrett. I’m Contego now too, right?”

  “Right,” he says softly, but his eyes are on my lips as he says it, through his distracted grin. “You are.”

  “I don’t think you’re really listening,” I tell him. “Or taking me seriously.”

  “I am,” he says, “but it’s hard to think of you that way.”

  “Why’s that?” My voice is flat.

  “Because,” he whispers. “You’re my girlfriend and you’re not trained yet. I can’t be all for total equality, not yet. I can’t help it. Not when it comes to you. I don’t know if I’m ever going to feel okay about you going out there on your own. Once you’re completely trained, you can kick the Fury’s tails right alongside me, but I’m still going to want to have your back every second and be sure that you’re okay. I keep feeling like something will happen if I’m not there.”

  “Like with your dad,” I say and Garrett’s brow crumbles. He looks away.

  “Yeah, like that.”

  “It was an ambush, Garrett. You couldn’t have saved him. You could’ve gotten yourself killed.”

  “I know that,” he says. “But I don’t feel that.”

  I want to kiss him. My kiss would say neither of us is alone in a way we could both believe. I’m positive. But then he looks up, through the domed glass ceiling, and when he looks back at me, the moment is gone. When he looks back at me, he points to his dress shirt and my tattered dress beneath it.

  “We should be listening for the door,” he says. “Somebody from FIXI should be coming to drop off clothes for us.”

  “Freddie said that too. What is FIXI?”

  “FIXI Incorporated. It’s the company that takes care of stocking the Ianua’s houses after moves and relocations. They keep files on each of us with our clothing sizes and preferences. When we have to relocate, they usually move all our things and set up our houses for us. They stock everything from shampoo in the bathroom to food in the kitchen. But this time, we didn’t know where we were going until we got here. We probably would’ve had a regular house someplace if the Fury hadn’t blown the library.”

  I lean a shoulder on the wall beside my door, staring out at the courtyard.

  “Who would make a file on me?” I ask. “How would they know…”

  “It was probably my mom,” he says. “After you and your mom moved in with us.”

  I rub the edge of Garrett’s dress shirt between my fingertips and someone knocks on my room door. Garrett opens the door and there’s a huge bag outside, on the floor. The hallway is empty.

  “Looks like you’ve got some decent clothes now.” He hefts up the bag and hands it to me, clothes leaking out the top. Our fingertips just miss touching.

  “I can go, so you can get cleaned up,” he says.

  “Or you can stay,” I tell him.

  I can’t imagine how Mrs. Reese knew exactly what to pick for me, but she did.

  I close the bathroom door and even before
I unpack the bag and the scent hits me. It is the scent of home. I pull out a clothes and underthings and even shoes, but I can’t find what I’m after, until I pull out a makeup bag at the very bottom, and it’s there. A bar of lavender vanilla soap, wrapped in tissue with a wisp of brown raffia. It’s my mom’s favorite soap. The kind that I bought her every Christmas. Now I know. It wasn’t Mrs. Reese that made the file on me.

  Garrett waits, even though I stay in the shower forever. When I finally come out, it’s in a puff of steam. My hair is still wet and combed away from my face and Garrett is sitting on the living room couch, with the TV on. His undershirt and dress pants are still streaked with dirt, but he’s rolled up his sleeves and taken off his shoes. He looks up when I walk out of the bathroom.

  The way he looks at me, his eyes widen and his lips open like he’s going to say something, but doesn’t. He takes a breath instead. And he stares a second before the wisp of a grin catches up and tickles both our lips. It’s like he’s never seen me before. I want him to look at me like this every single time I walk into a room for the rest of my life.

  He closes his mouth and clears his throat, the grin spreading out. “Feel better?”

  “Yeah.” I nod. Smile. He motions to the cushion beside him.

  “Come and see,” he says and his eyes follow me as I cross the room and take the seat beside him. “You won’t believe everything on TV.”

  We both look at the screen. There are two reporters, a man and a woman, at a desk.

  “What a horrific story, Kent.” The woman says, shaking her head. “The firefighters are still working around the clock to extinguish the fires set by rioters…And in other news this evening, four new families have come together to share information this evening, in hopes that it will help to bring their children home...”

  Garrett and I sit beside one another, motionless and riveted to the bad news spewing out of the TV. Four child abductions, a riot that popped up in the state’s capitol for no reason, domestic violence reported in such numbers this evening that the police can’t keep up. There’s so much going on that even the newscasters seem shocked as they keep touching their ear pieces and saying, “And just in…”

  “We need to find the key,” I say.

  “I was thinking about that.” Garrett rubs his lip. “How did the Fury know where we were and why would they be so sure the Key was there? We haven’t had your grandfather’s Memory since Roger took it. We assumed the Fury had buried it somewhere, but evidently, Roger did that and never let them know where.”

  “But if we had, wouldn’t it immediately be blessed and used against them?”

  “You’d think so,” Garrett says.

  “If we don’t have it and they don’t have it…where should we start looking?” I ask. The world suddenly seems impossibly big.

  “I don’t know,” Garrett says, “but we’ll figure it out. First thing tomorrow morning.”

  Chapter 9

  I’M IN A CAR.

  I climb over the seat and sit at the steering wheel, but there are no keys.

  Looking over the dashboard, there’s a traffic sign in front of the car, with arrows pointing in all directions. Everyone in the car, whoever they are, is shouting at me to get going. Left and right, forward, backward…it’s all too much.

  I clutch my head, confused.

  My head is made of glass.

  And someone’s pounding on it. BLAM BLAM BLAM…

  My eyes pop open and I jump off of the couch I was lying on, whacking my shin on an unfamiliar coffee table. My bubble explodes around me as I realize I’m not at home, my head isn’t glass, and it isn’t Zane beating on a library window. I’m not anywhere I recognize.

  But the pounding isn’t pounding either. It’s only knocking. My eyes dart to where it’s coming from: a sliding glass door. It takes me a second to understand why Garrett is here with me, scrambling off of a living room chair to open the door, and another second to recognize Sean’s face, as he steps over the threshold from the courtyard outside.

  I finally take the complete leap back from the line drawn between my consciousness and my dreams, and my field bursts. I’m at the Hotel Celare. I exhale and collapse onto the couch. I brush my fingers through my hair as my brain retraces my steps here: the library fire, the Memory I need to find, the way Garrett sat across from me last night, talking softly about the Key, as my eyes kept fluttering shut and finally stayed that way.

  Sean strolls in, carrying a bowl of cereal. My heartbeat finally drops back to normal.

  “Get up sleepy heads,” Sean says and waves hello to me with his spoon before turning to Garrett. “Addo wants to teach me to do the Blessings on all the memories in Alo Evangeline’s storage sheds this morning. Mom wants you and Nalena to come along, since now there are two Addos to protect.”

  Sean grins broadly, scooping another heap of cereal into his mouth. Garrett just nods as he stretches and yawns.

  From the corner of my eye, I catch a blur of Mark, streaking toward the sliding door. He shoots through the opening and crashes against Sean’s back.

  “Hey!” Sean lurches, slopping his milk, but Mark ignores him, slamming the door shut with a bang. He throws the lock just as Brandon hurls himself against the door.

  “What are you up to?” Sean yelps. Brandon’s nostrils, pressed to the glass, make streaks of steam like an angry bull.

  Instead of an answer, Mark reaches down into the waistband of his jeans and fishes around until he plucks Brandon’s Hacky Sack from the depths. He displays it on tripod fingers, like a trophy, and he grins at Brandon through the glass.

  “I won it fair and square, but he wouldn’t give it to me,” Mark says. “So I waited until he was in the bathroom and I nabbed it.”

  Brandon starts pounding on the glass, but Garrett steps forward, snatching the tiny ball from his youngest brother’s fingertips. Garrett holds the ball at arm’s length, over Mark’s head and lets his little brother keep jumping for it and shrieking that it’s his, even as Garrett uses his free hand to flip the latch on the glass door.

  Brandon shoots in and without a word or look at the rest of us, launches himself at Mark. The two of them hit the ground and thump against the coffee table just as a knock comes from the hallway door. Garrett steps over his wrestling brothers to answer it.

  Sean keeps eating, but he gives the wriggling heap of his brothers a nudge with one foot. “Knock it off, you two,” he says.

  Garrett opens the door and Mrs. Reese steps inside. She catches sight of her two youngest rolling across the floor.

  “Brandon, Mark,” her voice is sharp. The boys jump to their feet. Brandon snatches the Hacky Sack off the floor, slipping it down the front of his pants, but Mrs. Reese holds out one hand. Brandon pulls the toy back out and deposits it in his mother’s palm with a groan.

  “We’re going out,” Mrs. Reese says. “And the two of you are staying here on watch until we return. There better not be any more of this fooling around, either. I want one of you on the roof, and one of you watching the gym. This is serious stuff, guys. Your sister will still be downstairs with Zaneen, so keep an eye out.”

  I remember Garrett mentioning something last night that Zaneen had moved in downstairs, to watch over Iris while Mrs. Reese took care of Ianua business, and that Zaneen wasn’t exactly happy about it. I was too tired to be very jealous last night, but my mind spins with thoughts of Zaneen watching over Iris, while Iris still won’t even look at me without crying.

  “Van and Freddie will be watching too,” Mrs. Reese continues, “but if you see anything out of place, anything at all,” she pauses and purses her lips, then she shakes it off and says, “Well, you know what to do.”

  I picture the things that Mark and Brandon would know how to do, like water balloon bombs and spitballs, but I know that Mrs. Reese means something way more dangerous. I smile and then get a little twinge of guilt for thinking about the possibility of Zaneen getting spit-balled and balloon-bombed by Mark and Brandon
.

  Mrs. Reese looks between Garrett and I. His hair doesn’t look like he slept on it at all, but I’m sure mine does. I reach up and smooth it down. I feel guilty standing in front of Mrs. Reese, as if something more happened last night than just me falling asleep on the couch and Garrett on the chair beside me. I have to clamp my lips shut against the urge to blurt out that Garrett won’t even touch me now.

  “You two,” Mrs. Reese wiggles her finger in the air between Garrett and I. My eyes drop to the nubby carpet and stick there. “I need you to get cleaned up really quick. We’ve got to get through all the storage sheds today and even with a secure car, I don’t want the Addo out in the open for any longer than necessary. I’ll meet you at the back exit in ten minutes, okay?”

  I mumble an okay beneath Garrett’s full-voiced, “Yup. We’re on it.”

  Before Mrs. Reese can even hit the door, I’m already in the bathroom peeling off my jammies and pulling on my jeans and remembering that I still need to figure out where to find my grandfather’s Memory.

  “You’re the tour guide,” Addo says with a smile as he plops into the bucket seat beside me. Garrett and Sean are in the back and Mrs. Reese is in the front seat, beside Shred.

  This van is different from the one last night. This time, it’s a wine-colored mini van with tinted windows and I thought it was funny, when I walked around the side of the van to get in, that there were stickers on the hatchback window indicating that Shred’s a soccer mom with four kids and two cats. Especially after Garrett told me that the van was as safe as Fort Knox, with impenetrable metal, tires that can’t go flat and double paned window glass that can withstand machine gun fire. I worry more about being able to get out of the van, once I get in.

  “So where to?” Shred asks once the doors are closed. Addo pivots toward me, one eyebrow raised and the whole van goes silent as I realize I’ve got to open my mouth.